My dissertation, Thinking Together: Joint Commitment and Social Epistemology, draws together my interests in philosophy of mind and epistemology. In it, I develop an answer to the question: What does it take for people to form epistemically good beliefs together, as a group? This means answering some other questions first: how we manage to do anything together, how we form groups, and how we form group beliefs. The underlying expectations and obligations that make togetherness possible come from a distinctive kind of representation that Margaret Gilbert calls "joint commitment." The kind of social epistemology I study starts by understanding commitment itself.
The thematic threads in my dissertation continue to spin out into other projects:
Can LLM chatbots act as interlocutors—as partners in figuring something out? What would a chatbot have to be like in order to say "yes," and if we say "no," how should that shape our interactions with chatbots?
Thinking with others depends on a certain degree of trust between jointly committed partners. Are chatbots appropriate objects of trust?
Do AI tools have the basic cognitive capacities—like the capacity for objective thought—necessary for artistic creation?
Some of the philosophers who inform my work in one way or another, in no particular order: